Miss Fortune

by Lauren Weedman

  Diane reaches over and grabs my hand. It’s nice for a moment, but then my hand gets sweaty, so I wriggle free. She grabs me back. We repeat this until finally I’m full-on struggling to get my hand away.

  Nobody ever holds my hand. David will grab my hand for a moment and then immediately get exhausted and let go.

  Diane pins my hand down and won’t let me pull away, like an orderly in a hospital trying to calm a mental patient. By the time the song is over, all the struggle stops and now I’m just holding hands with her.

  Holding hands is good shit. I will hold hands with my son longer than he wants me to. I will hold on because it feels so good to have someone hold you longer than you want. You let go but they still have you. It’s why you hold someone’s hand when they are dying. No words, just a presence. I start crying and this time I know it’s not hormonal. Thank god for Randy’s birthday present.

  The topic in Danza’s minivan after the concert is which song was everyone’s favorite.

  “Lauren and I vote for ‘Mother and Child Reunion,’” Diane yells from the back of the van, where we’re sitting.

  “Little known fact: People think that that song is about a dog he loved but it’s actually about his favorite dish at a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn that closed down.” Thank you, Justin. Justin’s my half brother, Diane’s oldest son. When I first met him he had a mullet and a rattail. Of course, I had blue eye shadow up to my eyebrows and a bad perm, so who I am to talk? Nowadays he’s a disgruntled lawyer.

  Danza’s father-in-law, who is also a lawyer, jumps right in. “Actually, Justin, it was the restaurant itself that added the dish to their menu in honor of Paul, their favorite customer. The song itself is about the death of a dog.”

  Don, Diane’s second husband, is in the van too. He insists that the song is about the Korean War.

  By the time we’ve dropped everyone off at his or her car or home, the song might as well have been about a meatball finding tomato sauce.

  The next morning Diane knocks on my bedroom door and asks me if I want to go with her to her coffee shop.

  “I thought your coffee shop was the one by me,” I say.

  “That’s my coffee shop in Santa Monica. This is my one in Bloomington. You coming or not?”

  We pull into the parking lot and I’m about to jump out when she stops me.

  “There is something I was thinking that maybe would be good for you to hear. Since you and your mother found me, I’ve never wanted you to think that the moment that you were born was in any way horrible or that your adoption was an awful ordeal. The last thing I wanted was for you to feel burdened or worried about me. But you know what? Maybe you need to know how painful it was. I’m realizing as you get older that maybe it would have helped you to know that giving you up for adoption was the most painful thing I’ve gone through in my life. Maybe the one thing I kept from you was the exact thing you needed to know—that you were not an easy baby to give up. Anyway, I just thought it would be nice for you to know that and I wish I’d told you earlier.”

  If anyone would have asked me if I needed to hear what she just told me I would have said no, but that’s because my need to hear it was so completely buried. Before I met Diane, I’d thought that out of necessity for my birth mother to move on, I’d been born unloved. Adopted by a family that had to love me but didn’t know what exactly they were getting. I didn’t feel incredibly valued, but everyone I knew felt that way, so why make a big Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade out of it? But if I were really honest, I had to admit that there were times I felt like a random clump of a human that had to be assigned to someone in order to be cared about. When awful things happened to me, I never thought anyone would care all that much.

  It mattered to me more than I could have imagined to know that I wasn’t an easy baby to dump.

  She rummages around in her purse and pulls out an old wadded-up Starbucks napkin and offers it to me to wipe my tears off my face and blow my nose.

  Diane reaches over and grabs my hand. “And hey, kid, I need to tell you something else.”

  By the way she’s staring out the window at the coffee shop, I take a guess that what she wants to tell me is something about how if they only have one piece of lemon pound cake, she’s not sharing. But I’m wrong.

  “I don’t give a shit about the pound cake; it’s all about the coffee cake at this place. If there’s only one piece of that left, hands off. It’s mine.”

  Horny Patty

  I’m fourteen weeks pregnant at an artists’ retreat in Florida.

  Most of my time is spent wandering around taking in all the natural beauty that the state has to offer. I’ve seen a turtle, an armadillo, and a bunch of drunk guys with no shirts buying honey buns at the 7-Eleven, when I should be writing. I remind myself that only moneymaking projects are allowed at this retreat, so I can squirrel away like a good waspy rodent for the long winter months when I won’t be able to perform because I’ll be too fat, and I won’t be able to write because I’ll be too distracted about being too fat.

  I’m here for only three weeks and I need to conceive, start, and finish an Oscar-winning screenplay, maybe something like Juno but with Aboriginal transsexual people; a web series that can be shot in a minivan, pay nothing to the actors, and be developed into a lucrative TV pilot starring all men; and a new theater piece about how having a baby is going to end my career. The theater piece may have to wait, because there’s no money in theater.

  Too bad, because the only thing I’m remotely inspired to do is the theater piece. The source material is endless here. None of the fifteen artists who were already here when I arrived have kids. None. They are accomplished professional artists. Most of them are professors at fancy liberal colleges who are on salary. There was one woman with kids, a Brazilian sculptor, but she broke her ankle after the second day and had to go home. Joseph, a sixty-two-year-old Pulitzer Prize–winning composer from New Haven, whose only child is his opera—“a spoiled little obnoxious girl who I will drown before the end of this week unless she kills me first”—broke the news to me at breakfast. I’d been saving a seat for her at my table so that she could tell me all about how having a baby affects your career.

  A few breakfasts later Joseph told me that the pain of missing her baby was so intense “it snapped her bones.”

  I said that I’d heard that she’d gotten drunk and fallen down some stairs.

  “Same thing,” he said. “Pass the flaxseed spread.”

  The best part of the day is when all the artists gather after dinner in the “Fellowship Hall” to sit on dirty couches, drink red wine, and shit talk whichever artist was dumb enough to stay in and work that night. That was the key to being respected here—showing up. There have been several transitions of artists coming and going. New ones arrived on Monday night. One of the new arrivals, an intense and dramatic playwright from Seattle named Tonia, very pale, with flapper-style jet-black hair, who is what I imagine Virginia Woolf must have been like, notices that I’m drinking only a half glass of red wine. I tell her I’m pregnant and she gasps. I thought maybe she’d recognized my giant glass as the centerpiece filled with floating candles from the night before, and maybe she did, but it wasn’t about that.

  “I had dreams once,” she tells me in a voice that sounds like an old-timey radio performance. “They all died. There are file cabinets full of my plays, but that’s all over now. You cannot be an artist and a mother—I don’t care what they say; they lie. You know why they lie? They lie because they want to lure you over to the other side. They say, ‘Have a baby. I did! And, why, I’ve never been happier.’ Lies. Believe me; the serpent draws blood along with milk!”

  Applause would have been an appropriate response to her performance, but I was too dizzy to slap my hands together. If I can’t tour and perform and experience the world outside of myself to write about—if I’m always here with Leo—I
’ll go crazy.

  My career is being in the world. Walking around being traumatized every five minutes and making a two-hour show about it. It’s an embarrassing way to make a living, but if I didn’t do that, I’m fairly sure I’d develop an addiction to engine cleaner or vaping saffron or something. It wouldn’t be the addiction that would kill me. It would be the fact that I couldn’t write a story about it because the baby would be a part of the story and writers can’t write about their kids because it’s not their story to tell. You can’t tell sex stories or curse or make fun of their fathers or talk about anal (that’s a type of foot cream, baby). Fuck.

  All the artists in the meeting hall are nodding in agreement with Tonia, or nodding off from red wine, except for the married writing team from San Diego, Carla and Paul. Thankfully Carla and Paul had brought in a new batch of folks who didn’t have metaphorical “stretch marks on their souls,” but real ones on their bodies.

  “That’s a bunch of cuckoo-bird yak-yak,” Carla, the wife, a ballbuster, no-makeup, no-nonsense lady originally from Mississippi, tells me. According to her, kids focus your time and generally make everything better. “Children are happy if you are happy,” Paul, who’s either Russian or just extremely exhausted, adds. “And if you are getting paid to do what you love to do, they’ll be happy.” I watch him get up to get some scotch tape to hold in the lenses of glasses that keep falling out whenever he isn’t sitting completely still.

  Their advice to me is to continue to tour, but take David with me. I love that idea because it’s essentially who we are—carny show folk. David had directed one of my theater shows in the past; now he could direct all of them. Run the lights with the baby strapped on his chest while I performed. We could combine our finances, throw the baby in the back of the wagon, and hit the road. They love their life. “It’s not conventional, but our kids are growing up with parents who get to do what they love, and more importantly we all get to be together.” They had dropped their kids off with a relative and were enjoying what they referred to as a rare romantic work getaway.

  Finally, I found my role models.

  Role models who fought like George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? every single day of their retreat.

  “I don’t know what page we are on! Do I look like MapQuest?!” The sound of their stressed-out marriage became a part of the retreat’s swampy soundscape. Every night after Fellowship Hall, the artists would retire to their studios and drift off to sleep to the sounds of gators grunting, insects chirping, and Carla screaming at Paul, “Why are you so fucking crabby? What’s your problem? Go home if you’re in such a bad mood!” Yeah, Paul! If you can’t sit there and be screamed at with a little better attitude, go home.

  Back at home, I’m driving to Nate ’n Al deli in Beverly Hills when Allen, my agent, calls me with an audition. Thank god. I accomplished absolutely nothing during the retreat. That’s not true. I memorized an e.e. cummings poem and learned how to play the chorus from David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on a ukulele. Not exactly powerful skills for the workforce.

  As many women’s magazines go on about working mothers and having it all, I have noticed that on airplanes when I pass through business class on the way back to the Septic Tank Section, it is still dominated by white men in suits. And rappers with their moms.

  Only celebrities are allowed to be pregnant and still work. They can afford nannies, and entire film shoots are scheduled around their pregnancies. Pregnant ladies in Hollywood are like spiders. The Hollywood studios scream when they see a spider and want to get rid of it, but then a good producer reminds them that spiders are vital to the system. They serve a purpose. The ones who serve a purpose are A-list famous ones. Talented ones. The bit players don’t serve a purpose. They don’t bring money into the studios or sell tickets. A pregnant Anne Heche is a spider. An alien spider but still a spider. A pregnant me is more like a flea. They will crush me between their fingernail and their forefinger and my career will be over.

  Without my career I’m nothing. I’m just a stack of bones covered with skin on a big rock hurtling toward my death.

  “Okay, what are the details?” I make “mmm-hmmm” noises as Allen talks, so he thinks I’m writing it all down instead of speeding down the 10 toward creamed herring and street parking I can’t afford.

  It’s for an HBO show called Hung, a comedy about a down-and-out high school baseball coach who, thanks to his special talent of having a large penis, becomes a gigolo. They would like to see me for the character of Horny Patty.

  Horny Patty sounds like a sexy bombshell type. I, however, am, as I’ve mentioned, pregnant. My face is covered in brown splotches, and I can’t stop burping and shitting my pants.

  “The casting people said just go in with no makeup and nerdy. Think lonely odd girl in the office who masturbates at her desk and goes to SeaWorld by herself.”

  He assures me that they want a “real” person and to play it “real.” They always say that. They said that when I auditioned for Desperate Housewives for “a shut-in who marries prison inmates.” The waiting room was a sea of tall, leggy models wearing tight mini-sundresses and high-heeled sandals. They all had so much makeup on they looked embalmed. I was wearing a full-length denim skirt and an oversize Mickey Mouse sleep shirt. Before I’d left the house David had begged me to put on more makeup and detangle the back of my hair.

  “David, she’s a shut-in! Why would she brush her hair?”

  “It’s a network show. Those are the parts that you have to add a ‘that you want to fuck’ at the end of every description,” David said.

  “Really? So if the character is a ninety-year-old Native American in a coma and it’s network, then it’s a ninety-year-old Native American ‘that you’d like to fuck’?”

  Turns out, David should have been a manager.

  My real manager assures me that this is different; it’s HBO.

  “Just making sure it’s actually a part that I could get.”

  “Listen, Weeds, you were invited to the party. When you’re invited to the party, you go.”

  I’m about to ask him if he stole that line from the Dalai Lama when he gives me a quick, “Sounds good, Weeds,” and hangs up.

  Of course I’ll audition. I have to. Everybody keeps telling me how babies are magic, so maybe I’ll get a good parking spot.

  On the way to the audition I call Allen to ask if there’s anything else I should know before I go in today. Anything that may throw me off, like “Bill Clinton will be in the room” or “The casting woman has no eyebrows.”

  “Her name is Horny Patty,” Allen says. “How many more details do you need?”

  The waiting room is crammed full of women. It’s clear that we are all here for the same part. It’s also clear that some of them have taken the “that you’d want to fuck” note to apply for network or cable. There’s an actress with amazing posture who came dressed as “nerdy porn girl.” She’s got thick black glasses on with tape wrapped around the nose and double Ds that the Lord gave her after she paid him a mighty sum.

  The energy in the room is pretty heavy. All the actresses look so miserable. They’re all deeply focused on inhabiting the character of Horny Patty. It’s a room full of Daniel Day-Lewises. Or maybe they’re just miserable. To break up the tension, or undermine the competition, I cross my fingers, shut my eyes, and shout, “GOD, I HOPE I GET THIS!” as I walk in. Nobody laughs. Usually I save my jokes for after the audition when I close the door, yell, “I GOT IT!” and then burst into fake sobs and run out of the room.

  In the corner of the room I spot an actress I see at every audition, Emma.

  She and I are always up for the same “crazy lesbian ballbuster” parts. To prove that I see her as a human and not just someone there to steal my health insurance, I tell her I like her outfit. She pulls out the sales tag still attached to the collar and says, “Nordstrom’s. I
put panty liners in my pits so I don’t ruin it.” She shoves the tags back in. She tells me how she’s been thinking about designing a T-shirt that reads I HATE MYSELF on the front for when she first walks in to audition and then I’M SORRY on the back for when she leaves.

  Emma is sure that she won’t get the part. “I know how this bullshit works. Someone like Juliette Lewis or Octavia Spencer probably already has the part. They’re just killing time until she signs her contract.”

  Usually I’m the manic wreck in the corner at an audition, pretending to go over my lines, but what I’m really doing is chanting “dead body in a casket . . . dead body in a casket,” trying to convince myself how unimportant booking a commercial for Gas-X is in the grand scheme of things. If it’s a film role, “dead body in a casket” isn’t graphic enough and I have to add images of eyelids sewn shut and a botched embalming.

  Today feels different. Emma goes on and on about her diet and hair regime with her sweat-soaked panty liner peeking out of the top of her blouse, and I’m able to do what the Buddhists have been yelling at me to do for years: observe the world around me without feeling any attachment to it.

  Did somebody slip a Xanax into my Red Bull?

  It’s so calming to know that in my always-uncertain life, one thing is for certain—a baby is coming.

  I mean, come on. What’s it all about at the end of it all? I’ve had a good career. I was on The Daily Show. I was fired from The Daily Show, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still have the luggage they gave me for Christmas. Eddie Murphy said I reminded him of Ruth Gordon. His body double told me later he meant Ruth Buzzi, but I think I’ll go with the real Eddie on that one.

  If I don’t get this job—in fact, if I never work in this town again—the baby is still coming. We could move to Corydon, Indiana, and live with my birth mother, Diane. She’s always letting me know that when I decide I’m done with the Hollywood thing, a simple small-town life is waiting for me. I’ll go back to waiting tables.